A > B does not imply that B is finite. But ericb already said this.
118 karma · joined September 1, 2007
"The multitude of available divination techniques are very useful for determining your own semi-conscious desires, as they each present a complete ambiguous and random pattern that your own subconscious will assign meaning to."
It reminds me of Douglas Adams' speech, "Is there an artificial God?"
"Apparently, we need to think about the building being inhabited by dragons and look at it in terms of how a dragon would move around it... This sounds like complete and utter nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be nonsense... Nevertheless... it may be there is something interesting going on... You figure out how the dragon's going to be happy here and lo and behold! you've suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in."
The anthropic principle is dual to Creationism. The Creationist says, "It is because God made it so." The scientist says, "It is because it necessarily must be so." Neither philosophy, by itself, leads to deeper understanding.
1.) "Life as we know it" is an extremely important phrase. Ask a biologist what life is, and she will probably say something about cells and DNA. It is possible for other self-replicating combinations of molecules to exist, but not on Earth, because the Cell/DNA model has become so effective at wiping the competition out. It's actually really hard to come to a solid definition of what "life" is, but if you make it sufficiently broad, I suspect you could find life even in some universes where the fundamental constants differ significantly from ours.
2.) We have no idea what determines the fundamental constants. You cannot talk about the "odds" of having a universe like ours until you know the probability distributions for each of the fundamental constants. Look at the H2O on Earth, and you will find that a significant portion of it occurs at 0C and 100C. Of course that is not a coincidence - water often exists at those temperatures because energy is spent on converting state, not on altering temperature. It's an equilibrium point. So likewise, it's POSSIBLE that the fundamental constants (of multiple universes, if they exist) interact in ways that cause them to arrive at equilibrium points. One really fascinating theory promoting this idea (and any theory is as good as the next, since we have very little empirical evidence available to us) is Lee Smolin's argument that the singularities within blackholes are themselves universe phases. Thus, a kind of "natural selection" of black holes occurs, which leads to more and more universes with fundamental constants ideal for producing black holes (and thus close to the constants necessary for life).
3.) The anthropic principle is just way too convenient, and I fear it de-motivates scientists from looking deeper into issues that really need explaining. Roger Penrose argues that there is a surprising lack of parsimony on behalf of whatever forces (spiritual or natural) brought about our universe. While our universe appears to have inflated from an initial region with a phase-space-volume of 10^(10^123), it would have been more than sufficient to create a life-supporting universe (several! in fact) from a region with only a phase-space-volume of 10^(10^117). Additionally, Penrose points out that the odds of creating an exact duplicate of our solar system from the random coming together of gas and radiation (no Darwinian evolution necessary!) is only 1 in 10^(10^60). (Penrose calls it "utter chicken feed" compared to the odds of the Big Bang producing ANY universe of our size). So even when you invoke the anthropic principle, the question still remains - why is our (life-supporting) universe so large and so old, when we could have done with so much less?
It has yet to create the same market that g-mail invites did when they first came out. I guess I should jump in while supply is low. :)
Fred Brooks: "Show me your flow charts and conceal your tables and I shall continue to be mystified, show me your tables and I won't usually need your flow charts; they'll be obvious."
Rob Pike: "Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming."
Eric S. Raymond: "Fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust."
Peter Norvig: "Use data-driven programming, where pattern/action pairs are stored in a table."